


Remembrance

by cirque



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil (Movieverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-02
Updated: 2012-09-02
Packaged: 2017-11-13 09:46:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/502145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cirque/pseuds/cirque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's twenty years after Raccoon City, and Claire and her brother have come to pay their respects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remembrance

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt 'sculpture' at tamingthemuse @ lj.
> 
> ALSO! I forgot to mention this, but this takes place in a universe where Raccoon City was rebuilt after it was bombed.

It’s twenty years after Raccoon City, and Claire and her brother have come to pay their respects. On the drive there, she dryly remarks that this is the first time they’ve been there together, but he doesn’t listen, doesn’t hear, just keeps drumming his hands on the steering wheel. She knows he’s anxious, knows he hates leaving Jill alone with a new baby, but she’s told him before and she’ll tell him again: it feels odd not to celebrate remembrance in some way.

 

They arrive in the ghost town just after 10am. Everything is still, as always. Nobody moved back to Raccoon City in the end. The government tried to fix it up, rebuild shops and houses, make it a living city again, but blood doesn’t wash off so easily. In the end they left it, like a warning, like plague towns in Europe were left to die off.

 

They gravitate to the police station like two bees to a hive. Chris drifts towards the old S.T.A.R.S office, and Claire waits in the lobby, remembering Martin, remembering the fear bubbling up inside her ‘til she was running on adrenaline. For the first time in years, she remembers Sherry, such a little thing, too pale, too unloved, just a kid in the middle of hell.

 

She wishes Jill could have come with them, but when Claire had mentioned it she’d gone pale just thinking about it. Claire had looked at the baby in her arms, Jill’s blue eyes, Chris’s chubby face, and she’d known:  _it’s too soon, it’ll always be too soon for Jill_. So she kissed her niece and gave Jill a promise that she’d bring flowers for Brad, for Richard, for Joseph.  _So many bodies on the sidewalk, so much blood_. Sherry had nightmares for weeks, and Claire had to pretend she didn’t.

 

“Hey,” calls Chris, and Claire turns 180. He’s coming out of the S.T.A.R.S office with a grin on his face and piece of paper in his hands. “So guess what?” He passes her the paper. “Looks like somebody suspects Umbrella might be developing B.O.Ws.” She reads it quickly; it’s the telegram she intercepted the last time she was here. How strange, that no one had thrown it out – but then she remembered, and felt sick to her stomach, because who was there to throw it out?

 

He’s still looking at her in that goofy way, and she’s reminded of her dumb big brother before the zombies and all the crap, and the two of them double up with laughter right there in the lobby.

 

“B.O.Ws,” Chris laughs, “imagine that, huh.”

 

“Oh god, I was so pissed at you for leaving without telling me,” she said.

 

He nodded sagely, “and I went to Europe and got trapped in that damned prison.”

 

It felt odd to remember these things as though they’d happened to someone else, in another lifetime entirely. They were different people now, older, scarred, armed. They weren’t fighters anymore, they were ordinary citizens. They were husbands and fathers and aunts and heroes.

 

They sober up and stare at each other, both thinking of the people they used to be, of the crazy shit that went down in this city. Claire looks around at the police station, exactly the same as it was when she’d left, and stares at the sculpture in the center of the lobby. It is a pale sculpture in a vague shape of a woman raising both her arms to the ceiling, it was never finished before the city went to hell, and there are bloodstains on the plinth where Claire killed the living dead.

 

“You know, this place really is something else. All those zombies, and monsters, and then this great big sculpture.” She points at it, and Chris follows her eyes. “And I had to pull a jewel from its hands.” He notices the tears in her eyes, and politely looks away. He remembers working there day in and day out, a 9 to 5 job in which he pushed paper around and became bored as hell, and fell crazily, privately in love with Officer Valentine.

 

“It’s funny,” he says, “how we remember the little things.” He’s thinking of Ozwell Spencer, of how it’s exactly a two hundred feet drop from the drawing room window, how he’d measured it and paced, and drove around in a little trawler boat in the ocean, refusing to give up. The little things came back to him, easily.

 

Claire reaches into her purse and decides to lay her flowers at the foot of the sculpture, because where else would be so fitting? She chose poppies, the flowers of war and of eternity. She lays them down, along with a picture she’s kept ever since that hellish night so long ago – it is a wax crayon drawing of Annette and William Birkin, drawn by Sherry when she was still innocent enough to want to draw. In the picture, Sherry’s parents are grinning, and have angel wings. As she looks around at the eerily silent police station, Claire begins to cry.

 

Chris puts his arm around his sister. There’s nothing he can say to comfort her; it’s been twenty years to the day, and he knows that all of them still have scars. On this day more than any, he craves the company of those he loves. He misses Rebecca, misses Barry.

 

“Come on,” he tells Claire, rubbing her shoulders, “let’s go home.”

 

In the car, driving as fast as they can from Raccoon City, Claire stops crying. She understands that it doesn’t matter where in the world they are, as long as they’re together. Going back to Raccoon City was just an arbitrary thing she felt compelled to do out of respect; the real act of remembrance came in being with those who were there too. She smiles at Chris, who is concentrating on the road, and she feels relieved to be going home to Jill, and a brand new baby. She slips her cell phone out of her pocket and it lights up excitedly. That angry feeling in the pit of her stomach is fading away, being replaced by one of release.

 

She should call Leon, on this day more than any.


End file.
